The Satanic Verses (9 page)

           
He, for his part, was required to handle with care. The first time he touched
her breasts she spouted hot astounding tears the colour and consistency of
buffalo milk. She had watched her mother die like a bird being carved for
dinner, first the left breast then the right, and still the cancer had spread.
Her fear of repeating her mother's death placed her chest off limits. Fearless
Zeeny's secret terror. She had never had a child but her eyes wept milk.

           
After their first lovemaking she started right in on him, the tears forgotten
now. "You know what you are, I'll tell you. A deserter is what, more
English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don't
think it's so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache."

           
"There's something strange going on," he wanted to say, "my
voice," but he didn't know how to put it, and held his tongue.

           
"People like you," she snorted, kissing his shoulder. "You come
back after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves. Well, baby, we got a
lower opinion of you." Her smile was brighter than Pamela's. "I
see," he said to her, "Zeeny, you didn't lose your Binaca
smile."

           
Binaca
. Where had that come from, the long forgotten toothpaste
advertisement? And the vowel sounds, distinctly unreliable. Watch out, Chamcha,
look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.

           
On the second night she arrived at the theatre with two friends in tow, a young
Marxist film-maker called George Miranda, a shambling whale of a man with
rolled-up kurta sleeves, a flapping waistcoat bearing ancient stains, and a
surprisingly military moustache with waxed points; and Bhupen Gandhi, poet and
journalist, who had gone prematurely grey but whose face was baby-innocent
until he unleashed his sly, giggling laugh. "Come on, Salad baba,"
Zeeny announced. "We're going to show you the town." She turned to
her companions. "These
Asians
from foreign got no shame," she
declared. "Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you."

           
"There was a TV reporter here some days back," George Miranda said.
"Pink hair. She said her name was Kerleeda. I couldn't work it out."

           
"Listen, George is too unworldly," Zeeny interrupted. "He
doesn't know what freaks you guys turn into. That Miss Singh, outrageous. I
told her, the name's Khalida, dearie, rhymes with Dalda, that's a cooking
medium. But she couldn't say it. Her own name. Take me to your kerleader. You
types got no culture. Just wogs now. Ain't it the truth?" she added, suddenly
gay and round-eyed, afraid she'd gone too far. "Stop bullying him,
Zeenat," Bhupen Gandhi said in his quiet voice. And George, awkwardly,
mumbled: "No offence, man. Joke-shoke."

           
Chamcha decided to grin and then fight back. "Zeeny," he said,
"the earth is full of Indians, you know that, we get everywhere, we become
tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin's fridge. Columbus was
right, maybe; the world's made up of Indies, East, West, North. Damn it, you
should be proud of us, our enterprise, the way we push against frontiers. Only
thing is, we're not Indian like you. You better get used to us. What was the
name of that book you wrote?"

           
"Listen," Zeeny put her arm through his. "Listen to my Salad.
Suddenly he wants to be Indian after spending his life trying to turn white.
All is not lost, you see. Something in there still alive." And Chamcha
felt himself flushing, felt the confusion mounting. India; it jumbled things
up.

           
"For Pete's sake," she added, knifing him with a kiss. "
Chamcha.
I mean, fuck it. You name yourself Mister Toady and you expect us not to
laugh."

           
* * * * *

           
In Zeeny's beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the back
seat better upholstered than the front, he felt the night closing in on him
like a crowd. India, measuring him against her forgotten immensity, her sheer
presence, the old despised disorder. An Amazonic hijra got up like an Indian
Wonder Woman, complete with silver trident, held up the traffic with one
imperious arm, sauntered in front of them. Chamcha stared into herhis glaring
eyes. Gibreel Farishta, the movie star who had unaccountably vanished from
view, rotted on the hoardings. Rubble, litter, noise. Cigarette advertisements
smoking past: SCISSORS―FOR THE MAN OF ACTION, SATISFACTION. And, more
improbably: PANAMA―PART OF THE GREAT INDIAN SCENE.

           
"Where are we going?" The night had acquired the quality of green
neon strip-lighting. Zeeny parked the car. "You're lost," she accused
him. "What do you know about Bombay? Your own city, only it never was. To
you, it's a dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Point is like living on
the moon. No bustees there, no sirree, only servants' quarters. Did Shiv Sena
elements come there to make communal trouble? Were your neighbours starving in
the textile strike? Did Datta Samant stage a rally in front of your bungalows?
How old were you when you met a trade unionist? How old the first time you got
on a local train instead of a car with driver? That wasn't Bombay, darling,
excuse me. That was Wonderland, Peristan, NeverNever, Oz."

           
"And you?" Saladin reminded her. "Where were you back
then?"

           
"Same place," she said fiercely. "With all the other bloody
Munchkins."

           
Back streets. A Jain temple was being re-painted and all the saints were in
plastic bags to protect them from the drips. A pavement magazine vendor
displayed newspapers full of horror: a railway disaster. Bhupen Gandhi began to
speak in his mild whisper. After the accident, he said, the surviving
passengers swam to the shore (the train had plunged off a bridge) and were met
by local villagers, who pushed them under the water until they drowned and then
looted their bodies.

           
"Shut your face," Zeeny shouted at him. "Why are you telling him
such things? Already he thinks we're savages, a lower form."

           
A shop was selling sandalwood to burn in a nearby Krishna temple and sets of
enamelled pink-and-white Krishna-eyes that saw everything. "Too damn much
to see," Bhupen said. "That is fact of matter."

           
* * * * *

           
In a crowded dhaba that George had started frequenting when he was making
contact, for movie purposes, with the dadas or bosses who ran the city's flesh
trade, dark rum was consumed at aluminium tables and George and Bhupen started,
a little boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank Thums Up Cola and denounced her
friends to Chamcha. "Drinking problems, both of them, broke as old pots,
they both mistreat their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No
wonder I fell for you, sugar, when the local product is so low grade you get to
like goods from foreign."

           
George had gone with Zeeny to Bhopal and was becoming noisy on the subject of
the catastrophe, interpreting it ideologically. "What is Amrika for
us?" he demanded. "It's not a real place. Power in its purest form,
disembodied, invisible. We can't see it but it screws us totally, no
escape." He compared the Union Carbide company to the Trojan Horse.
"We invited the bastards in." It was like the story of the forty
thieves, he said. Hiding in their amphoras and waiting for the night. "We
had no Ali Baba, misfortunately," he cried. "Who did we have? Mr.
Rajiv G."

           
At this point Bhupen Gandhi stood up abruptly, unsteadily, and began, as though
possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to testify. "For me," he
said, "the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always forgive
ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse me,
George, but for me it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with that."
The massacre of the innocents. Photographs of children's corpses, arranged
neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed to death, pelted
with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. Those neat ranks of death,
Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into orderliness.

           
Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. "We
are all guilty of Assam," he said. "Each person of us. Unless and
until we face it, that the children's deaths were our fault, we cannot call
ourselves a civilized people." He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his
voice got louder, and his body began to lean dangerously, but although the room
fell silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody
called him a drunk. In the middle of a sentence,
everyday blindings, or
shootings, or corruptions, who do we think we
, he sat down heavily and
stared into his glass.

           
Now a young man stood up in a far corner of the joint and argued back. Assam
had to be understood politically, he cried, there were economic reasons, and
yet another fellow came to his feet to reply, cash matters do not explain why a
grown man clubs a little girl to death, and then another fellow said, if you
think that, you have never been hungry, salah, how bloody romantic to suppose
economics cannot make men into beasts. Chamcha clutched at his glass as the
noise level rose, and the air seemed to thicken, gold teeth flashed in his
face, shoulders rubbed against his, elbows nudged, the air was turning into
soup, and in his chest the irregular palpitations had begun. George grabbed him
by the wrist and dragged him out into the street. "You okay, man? You were
turning green." Saladin nodded his thanks, gasped in lungfuls of the
night, calmed down. "Rum and exhaustion," he said. "I have the
peculiar habit of getting my nerves after the show. Quite often I get wobbly.
Should have known." Zeeny was looking at him, and there was more in her
eyes than sympathy. A glittering look, triumphant, hard.
Something got
through to you
, her expression gloated.
About bloody time
.

           
After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to the
disease for ten years or so. But nothing is forever; eventually the antibodies
vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that his blood no longer
contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to suffer India's
reality. Rum, heart palpitations, a sickness of the spirit. Time for bed.

           
She wouldn't take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the
gold-medallioned young Arabs strutting in the midnight corridors holding
bottles of contraband whisky. He lay on the bed with his shoes on, his collar
and tie loose, his right arm flung across his eyes; she, in the hotel's white
bathrobe, bent over him and kissed his chin. "I'll tell you what happened
to you tonight," she said. "You could say we cracked your
shell."

           
He sat up, angry. "Well, this is what's inside," he blazed at her.
"An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these
days, people look polite. This is me." Caught in the aspic of his adopted
language, he had begun to hear, in India's Babel, an ominous warning: don't
come back again. When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back
at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.

           
"I was so proud of Bhupen tonight," Zeeny said, getting into bed.
"In how many countries could you go into some bar and start up a debate
like that? The passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your
civilization, Toadji; I like this one plenty fine."

           
"Give up on me," he begged her. "I don't like people dropping in
to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and
kabaddi, I can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happen at a nikah
ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This
isn't home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes
my heart tremble and my head spin."

           
"You're a stupid," she shouted at him. "A stupid. Change back!
Damn fool! Of course you can." She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back
to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not
become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was
going to use it.

           
* * * * *

           
"You never married," he said when they both lay sleepless in the
small hours. Zeeny snorted. "You've really been gone too long. Can't you
see me? I'm a blackie." Arching her back and throwing off the sheet to
show off her lavishness. When the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came out of the
ravines to surrender and be photographed, the newspapers at once uncreated
their own myth of her
legendary beauty
. She became
plain, a common
creature, unappetizing
where she had been
toothsome
. Dark skin in
north India. "I don't buy it," Saladin said. "You don't expect
me to believe that."

           
She laughed. "Good, you're not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to marry? I
had work to do."

           
And after a pause, she threw his question back at him.
So, then. And you?

           
Not only married, but rich. "So tell, na. How you live, you and the
mame." In a five-storey mansion in Notting Hill. He had started feeling
insecure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken not
only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was not
possible, he had begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal elements
kidnapped the animals. Pamela told him it was an old local custom. In the Olden
Days, she said (history, for Pamela, was divided into the Ancient Era, the Dark
Ages, the Olden Days, the British Empire, the Modern Age and the Present),
petnapping was good business. The poor would steal the canines of the rich,
train them to forget their names, and sell them back to their grieving,
helpless owners in shops on Portobello Road. Pamela's local history was always
detailed and frequently unreliable. "But, my God," Zeeny Vakil said,
"you must sell up pronto and move. I know those English, all the same,
riff-raff and nawabs. You can't fight their bloody traditions."